Blue Velvet – (1986) Behind a blue-velvet curtain director/writer David Lynch’s film opens on a sunny idyllic scene from the early ‘60s of a shiny fire truck and waving fireman motoring down a peaceful street in Lumberton, suggestive of the Beatles’ song “Penny Lane,” but, of course, Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” is in the soundtrack. Tom Beaumont, owner of Beaumont’s hardware store, stands watering his front yard with a garden hose that becomes a metaphor of his stressed circulatory system before he collapses on the lawn.

Within a seemingly normal setting lurks a strange world of corruption. His son Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), an innocent young man, finds a severed ear in a vacant lot in the neighborhood. Before Jeffrey picks it up, the ear becomes a portal affording a momentary glimpse of an underworld beneath the serene surface of a small-town’s ordinary decency. Jeffrey takes the ear to the police station and hands it over to Detective John Williams. Later at the detective’s home, in Jeffrey’s neighborhood, Williams tells the young man to keep his discovery to himself and promises once the case is finished he’ll provide all the details. However, the detective’s high-school daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) has overheard something additional about the case and shares it with Jeffrey. Together they begin a secretive investigation of their own. His curiosity getting the better of him, Jeffrey takes matters into his own hands and finds a way into the apartment of police-suspect Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a masochistic nightclub singer, who suffers/enjoys the abuses Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a sadistic psychopath addicted to snorting helium, forces on her.

Frank spewing obscenities and his goon squad (including Jack Nance as Paul) confront Jeffrey leaving Dorothy’s apartment and take both of them on a harrowing journey into drugs, death, and depravity. Fear not for our hero’s soul is pure, and Sandy’s dream of robins returning comes true. (The significance of the robin with a bug in its beak at the conclusion links the bird to Jeffrey when he first entered Dorothy’s apartment using the ruse of coming to exterminate pests. The dramatic shot of the Lincoln Street sign early in the movie conjured up several associations from the Lincoln Logs kids played with in the ‘50s, Abe Lincoln the rail splitter in a lumber town, and his assassination linked to JFK’s assassination by coincidence of a cabinet member named Lincoln and all the conspiracy theories.

Kennedy’s death put an end to the sunny disposition of the country and the idealized nuclear family – from The Donna Reed Show to Father Knows Best to My Three Sons to Leave It to Beaver – as more assassinations were to follow, thermonuclear politics, Vietnam, race riots, the hedonism and permissiveness of the youth culture. Only two African-American characters, who would have been referred to then as Negroes, appear in the movie, employees in the Beaumont store, one of whom is blind but has an uncanny ability to see. Jeffrey’s admitting he doesn’t understanding how someone blind can have vision suggests his ignorance of black Americans in a largely white town. Here Andy Griffith’s Mayberry has become “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Frank Booth’s out-of-control character reminded me of the films the federal government made in the ‘30s and ‘40s, such as Reefer Madness, depicting dope fiends as dangerous threats to society and youths. I’m not sure whether David Lynch is in agreement with this viewpoint or whether his film is intended to be seen ironically.)

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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